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Dyslexia: trouble reading ‘four’

Dyslexia affects about every tenth reader. It shows up when trying to read, especially when reading fast. But it is still not fully clear what words dyslexic readers find particularly hard. So, I did some research to find out, and I published the article today.

The bookworm (presumably non-dyslexic)

Imagine seeing a new word ‘bour’. How would you pronounce it? Similar to ‘four’, similar to ‘flour’ or similar to ‘tour’? It is impossible to know. Therefore, words such as ‘four’, ‘flour’ and ‘tour’ are said to be inconsistent – one doesn’t know how to pronounce them when encountering them for the very first time. Given this pronunciation challenge, I, together with my co-author Christoph Scheepers, hypothesised that such words would be more difficult for readers generally, and for dyslexic readers especially.

Finding evidence for a dyslexia specific problem is challenging because dyslexic participants tend to be slower than non-dyslexic people in most tasks that they do. So, if you force them to be as quick as typical readers they will seem bad readers even though they might be merely slow readers. Therefore, we adopted a new task that gave people a very long time to judge whether a bunch of letters are a word or not.

It turns out that inconsistent words like ‘four’ slow down both dyslexic and typical readers. But on top of that dyslexic readers never quite reach the same accuracy as typical readers with these words. It is as if the additional challenge these words pose can, with time, be surmounted in normal readers while dyslexic readers have trouble no matter how much time you give them. In other words, dyslexic people aren’t just slow. At least for some words they have trouble no matter how long they look at them.

This is my very first publication based on work I did more than four years ago. You should check out whether the waiting was worth it. The article is free to access here. I hope it will convince you that dyslexia is a real challenge to investigate. Still, the pay-off to fully understanding it is enormous: helping dyslexic readers cope in a literate society.